Corbyn: the Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics

This book, a study of Jeremy Corbyn's unexpected landslide victory of the Labour Party's leadership race and its implications by Richard Seymour, is a riveting and challenging read. I bought it as a Fathers' Day present for my dad, whose interest in politics has been stirred by the resurgence of the meaningful alternative to neoliberal hegemony that Corbyn provides and that is increasingly becoming a powerful force in British politics: I took it to a festival he was lined up to speak at but given certain events this week (BREXIT) he's been facing even stronger than usual criticisms, culminating in Labour MPs calling for this democratically-elected suppported-by-majority-of-party-members highly-principled man to step down, and so he pulled out.
   To be honest I'm too disgusted with the British public at the current news to bother writing much reflection about this book. I'm just going to briefly say what it's about then rant a lot.
   Seymour is a keen historian and commentator, and while his left-wing bias does show through it's clear that he's not an unthinking Corbynista - the book delves into some deep scrutiny of problems with Labour and with British politics in general that have been developing for decades, and which Jeremy Corbyn is uniquely poised to try to change (or, as currently looks more likely, to fall victim to). There are incredibly complex and well-rooted defence mechanisms of the conservative establishment in British society, supported by the anti-intellectual culture and non-proportionally-representative structure of our 'democracy': Richard Seymour does an excellent job of walking us through the last few decades of the Labour Party, its slow and deliberate killing-off of grassroots working-class support through New Labour, its desperation for electability-at-all-costs dragging it relentlessly to the right, these two factors robbing Labour leaders of the possibility of countering the status quo and promoting social justice by establishing clear narratives about what is wrong with our societies and economies. Corbyn has been hounded, ridiculed, aggressively targeted by the government, by corportate powers, by the mainstream media, by vast swathes of Middle Englanders, and by his own party. I fully recognise that his leadership style is not the slick presidential one of Blair or Cameron, his voting record is led so consistently by principle above the whip and so many in Parliament distrust his capacity for uniting the party, his ideology is distinctively one of democratic socialism which (given neoliberal hegemony) it is fashionable to say is dead these days. He doesn't wear expensive suits or show adequate respect to monarchs whom, to be fair, he doesn't believe should exist in the privileged aristocratic vacuum that they do. But the Labour Party has been dying slowly for years (hence why self-indulgent liberal lefties like me often lend support elsewhere) - maybe our current state of affairs is so royally messed up that the advocation of peace and equality truly is 'completely unelectable'; nevertheless he has the mandate of Labour's members, and for the party to have spent the year since his election trying their best to oust him one way or another is a disgrace and makes a shambolic mockery of the British political left. How can we have enough solidarity to make meaningful gains against the conservative establishment if we can't accept an (admittedly quite boring but by pretty much everyone's account very nice) imperfect leader and make the best of having him in that position? Corbyn's leadership should prompt opportunities to completely challenge and change the way we do politics: both reframing narratives about social and economic issues to re-engage working-class voters with the political system and help them understand policies that will actually benefit them, as well as reforming the manner in which political conversation is held in the public eye to make it kinder, less grounded in tribal rhetoric, appealing to reason and people's propensity for goodness rather than stimulating fear and division. We somehow find ourselves in a Britain in which people trust Eton-Oxbridge-educated professional defenders of the privileged elite telling them that what's best for them are policy sets that anyone with a scrap of economic literacy should be able to tell are thinly-disguised entrenchments of that very same elite privilege. Yet on that same austerity-swallowing Brexit-voting island, a gentle bearded man, who wears cardigans knitted by him mum to the House of Commons, who has spent his entire adult life campaigning for social justice, for the poor, against war and racism and discrimination of all kinds, is reviled as a national traitor because of the angle at which he bowed at a memorial.
   Anyway. My own furiously bubbling intent to emigrate aside, this book is an excellent insight into the problems facing our contemporary democratic system and the Labour Party's place in it, putting Jeremy Corbyn into a context in which he is shown for what he is: an opportunity for real tangible change. Maybe he won't win a general election, maybe he will - but with the support of the Party and its members he is the perfect leader to reshape the way in which British politics occurs, and shift its parameters to the left. This is something definitely achievable, and of urgent importance in our political climate, where the gap between rich and poor continues to grow and far-right sentiments boil into personifications like Nigel Farage who have contributed to a normalisation of xenophobia. Richard Seymour writes well and clearly, and at no point slips into either the empty utopian vision-spouting nor the empty dystopian scaremongering that books on party politics often do. He maintains balance and objectivity, showing Corbyn as a genuine figure of possibility and hope.

[If you're interested in these problems but can't be arsed to read a whole book, check out this, this, and this Guardian opinion pieces, or even better this and this blog post from Another Angry Voice.]

the Cultural Impact of Kanye West

This book, a collection of essays about [you should be able to guess what from the title] edited by Julius Bailey, was, far from the vacuous pop-culture-dissection pseudo-academia that people seemed to expect of it when I mentioned that it was on my currently-being-read-shelf, actually one of the most interesting books I've read so far this year.

   I acquired it in February, following an evening in which I had my eyes (ears) opened to Kanye properly for the first time, having never properly listened to his music, when my housemate Adam (a longtime fan of Mr West) proposed that we watch the livestream of his new album (The Life of Pablo) launch from Madison Square Garden. So we did: in a flurry of egoism and the launch of not only his seventh solo album but his new fashion range (more or less loads of people dressed as [refugees?] stood unsmiling unmoving on a series of platforms throughout the launch), Mr West proceeded to press 'play' on a laptop and so commence the world's first public hearing of an album that he'd changed the name of four times, still hadn't decided on the final tracklist for, even months after this launch hadn't made publicly available except on Jay-Z's failing-small-fish-in-a-heavily-monopolised-pond streaming service Tidal, and had described as 'the best album of all time' - so, expectations were high. And to be fair, while we'll allow his ego to gloss over his hyperbolic hype, it actually was a really good album. So over the next two days I decided to give his other music a try, listening to all six of his previous solo albums with Adam (yeh, February was not a busy month for our house) at least once (I think I listened to Yeezus and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy thrice each), and it suffices to say that I became an unshakeable admirer of Kanye West as an artist. Which left me in something of a quandary. Having never properly listened to his music before, I'd always presumed* he was 'just an alright rapper' with a penchant for ridiculous egotistical outbursts, aggressive outspoken narcissism, a god complex, whatever you want to call it - a bit delusional and a bit of a dickhead. But there was a deep creativity to his music and intellectual weight to his lyrics, even if they did so often dip into the stereotypical 'misogyny and materialistic boasting' tropes of rap, it did so with a self-awareness and political consciousness that signifies a lot more thought behind the craft than I suspect is the case with much stereotypical rap.** Whatever the case, I was curious how he maintained such a controversial and seemingly high-risk public character at the same time as not being an out-and-out loon but a fully-fledged genius. So I bought this. And then couldn't read it until about two months ago because my housemate Chris was writing a dissertation about hiphop (yes, actually) so he borrowed it.

   Anyway.

   I wasn't exactly sure what kind of questions I wanted answered or which ones this book would answer, but needless to say, each of the essays contained in here was deeply engaging, relatively readable (though some of them are pretty steeped in liberal-academia-babble and/or cultural studies jargon), and highly educational about something I didn't know that much about. Kanye as a person, a male, a black person, a constructed persona, an artist, an ego, and a philosopher-by-implication is discussed in-depth, as is his work, all placed and explored carefully in a range of contexts - hiphop culture in wider American music, issues of race and gender, media responses to celebrity actions, and so on. I've not really got many major personal reflections on this book, I just found the essays really stimulating and educational, but since a far-too-large chunk of this post hasn't been about the book at all, I'll flesh it out with a bullet-pointed list of the essays and try to give a rough description [not summary] of their content/gist.

• 'Now I Ain't Sayin' He's a Crate Digger': Kanye West, 'Community Theatres', and the Soul Archive
• Mark Anthony Neal explores Kanye's prolific habit of sampling classic soul tracks, and how this has deepened and developed racial-cultural links to the history of African-American music.
• Kanye West: Asterisk Genius?
• Akil Houston examines what constitutes a 'genius' in a creative sense, and tries to determine whether, by placing his work in its artistic context, Kanye is one, as Kanye himself certainly seems to think.
• Afrofuturism: the Digital Turn and the Visual Art of Kanye West
• Reynaldo Anderson and John Jennings look at how Kanye's music videos, album artwork, fashion designs, and other visual media convey a distinctly 'black' interpretation of futuristic post-modern forms.
• You Got Kanyed: Seen But Not Heard
• David J. Leonard examines how Kanye's occasional 'public outbursts' (e.g. "Taylor I'ma let you finish" or that time he slammed George W. Bush for failing after Katrina) have their generally not-too-well-put but politically salient points ignored by the media, which instead reduces his actions to those of a [rich and famous but still] black man stepping out of line.
• An Examination of Kanye West's Higher Education Trilogy
• Heidi R. Lewis looks at the sociopolitical implications, of which there are myriad, embedded in the artistic choices and lyrical content of his first three albums.
• 'By Any Means Necessary': Kanye West and the Hypermasculine Construct
• Sha'Dawn Battle discusses how hiphop culture's misogyny may be a socio-politico-cultural vent in response to the systemic dehumanisation of black men in a racist society (i.e. oppressed black males seek to affirm their personhood by affirming their manhood, and so heterosexual conquest becomes a demographic keystone of status).
• Kanye West's Sonic [Hip-Hop] Cosmopolitanism
• Regina N. Bradley examines how the musical stylistic choices Kanye makes may reflect his aims to transcend and break down certain social boundaries.
• 'Hard to Get Straight': Kanye West, Masculine Anxiety, Dis-identification
• Tim'm West looks at a similar issue to Sha'Dawn Battle's above essay, though here examining hiphop's attitudes to homosexuality, and how Kanye has rocked the boat in this regard by not voicing prevalent prejudices.
• 'You Can't Stand the Nigger I See!': Kanye West's Analysis of Anti-Black Death
• Tommy Curry explores very similar issues to Sha'Dawn Battle's above essay, with an emphasis on the racist oppression and sexualisation of black men, and how Kanye both embraces and shatters these prejudices in his lyrics and constructed persona.
• When Apollo and Dionysus Clash: a Nietzschean Perspective on the Work of Kanye West
• Julius Bailey (the book's editor), in what I feel is the best-titled but one of the least rewarding essays of the lot, explores Nietzsche's concept structures of aesthetics, and how aspects of Apollo (ordered rationalism) and Dionysus (embodied emotivism) are blended together by Kanye to generate art that provokes interested thought and raw base feeling from very closely-bound aspects of his work.
• God of the New Slaves or Slave to the Ideas of Religion and God?
• Monica R. Miller examines the religious concepts that recur in Kanye's work, particularly focusing on his adoption of the name/persona 'Yeezus' as a means of making points about his socioeconomic status as a black man framed in terminology and imagery derived from Christian traditions, whether this could be considered blasphemous, and whether Kanye's own beliefs are relevant.
• Trimalchio from Chicago: Flashing Lights and the Great Kanye in West Egg
• A. D. Carson sketches the parallels between Kanye's pursuit of true hiphop and the core character drive of Jay Gatsby in what is frankly a pretty weird essay.
• Confidently [Non]cognizant of Neoliberalism: Kanye West and the Interruption of Taylor Swift
• Nicholas D. Krebs outlines neoliberalism's propensity for upholding certain inequalities while simultaneously co-opting other socio-politico-cultural movements or trends, in this case hiphop, a music derived from black people's experience (the oppressive nature of which is unchallenged by neoliberal order) which has become highly profitable in neoliberal consumer societies so long as it doesn't seek to call out the messed-up racist structures underpinning the whole spectacle. Kanye however will persistently rap about structural racism, make loads of money from it, and then feel empowered enough as an influential artist to speak out against Taylor Swift's trumping Beyoncé on the grounds that her whiteness had validated her as the winner even if she was otherwise less deserving. The racist neoliberal system did not respond kindly (see also David J. Leonard's above essay on similar topic).
• Kanye Omari West: Visions of Modernity
• Dawn Boeck tracks three phases in Kanye's artistic development, and the implications within each phase for his vision of modernity and his place within it as an influential rich famous black creative genius. Chock-full of excellent thought-provoking stuff, this one.

   So, that's the book. Anyone just expecting a low-key easy-read book about Kanye will be taken aback by how riotously scholarly the bulk of these essays are. That said, anyone interested in Kanye, to any extent, will probably find themselves learning a lot from this - and anyone interested in race, music, culture, and celebrities in the media, will probably gain a lot from reading it too. My one gripe with the book isn't a legitimate gripe, I'm just slightly annoyed that it came out in 2014, two years before The Life of Pablo, and having relistened to his full discography a few times since February (especially his seventh album which is a strong contender for my favourite), I feel like Pablo's attitude, content, and style develop certain threads explored in this book further in extremely interesting ways (especially the essays of Monica R. Miller, Akil Houston, and Dawn Boeck), and I'd have loved to read about that. But alas. Maybe I could write my own thoughts and reflections?

   Nah. Now, where are my damn croissants?

* This implies that I was completely ignorant of him, but even before having listened to his music, for several years I've had a weird fascination with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, simply for how powerfully they seem to exemplify something about individualism and fame in modern Western society. They both flaunt deep-rooted egoism alongside extremely adept control of their own personas in the public eye, Kim through empowered-patriarchal-female use of and complete reclamation of her sexualised image, Kanye through empowered-patriarchal-male use of his work and words, even [especially?] when it grates people.

** I have never felt like such a White Boy, writing that sentence.

[Edit - May 2018: in light of Kanye's quasi-racist-apologetic stunt of what I'd like to think is a risky but (obviously ego-spotlight-flauntatious regardless) calculatedly subversive bomb of outlandishly controversial performance art mixed with an actually-quite-constructive way of gaining influence on those in power without alienating them from the off - although any such not-really-that-unreasonable-in-the-development-of-West-as-a-creative/-celebrity-personality suggestions hitherto are taken kindly by the assembled masses of the online commentariat, which is not known for its general capacity to handle nuance or feel a whiff of cognitive dissonance on a good day, let alone be expected to respond aright to a deliberately-obtuse political about-turn from a figure increasingly regarded as having transmorphed from benign self-obsessed maniac genius into an ever-further obtuse and evasive figure as to whose real inner life it has become utterly fatuous to speculate about, so far has he himself deliberatedly deconstructed the lines between his frictional frontline celebrity life and the artwork that keeps him in it? I get the vague impression that most of his audience have given up trying to know what to think, as also I should probably apologise herewith for the previous sentence. (And I'm not even sure why it ends with a question mark but there we go.) Well, and especially, when out of the tumult of this media/social-media cacophony of outrage, apologistic speculations, further outrage at the apologistic speculations, which prompted polite responses which after a few more million back-and-forths of this across the internet eventually, obviously, was to descend into what always happens in these situations which is that every echo chamber involved hastily cobbles an ad hoc 'line' and everyone rapidly (unless already having said something about it, in which case they're either an influencer (vague strokes of common opinion between them determining the line), a tentative follower (who may then edit what they said if the line comes out different later on), or an opinionated outcast without enough followers to care about in this birds-eye view anyway) adheres to it. It is fair to say that arguments about Kanye West were happening. Then he dropped a pair of new songs, the latter of which is a lyrically-potent dialogue about his new political stance and his relationship with Donald Trump called Ye vs. the People (with the people here being represented in rap form by T.I.), and the former a two-minute old-skool-brick-phone-ringtone-kinda-vibe moonburst called Lift Yourself, the extremely-pre-hyped final verse to which comprised Kanye saying the absolute most he possibly could have packed into a single verse at this exact moment in his drift across the public gaze: gibberish. (Okay it was more like an extended scat-like thing more-or-less just rejiggling the components of the profound syllables "woop diddy scoop, poopty de doop" - the point is, now people are still just as, if not more confused, by the whole debacle, which has maintained a high degree of online discussion about it, including this now that I'm looking back at it extremely long addition to a blogpost almost two years old which might not ever be read by anyone but me as this is quite an old one and who reads this anyway? so but only goes further to show how effective a self-perpetuating incorrigible unfathomable character of celebrity and controversy and creativity Kanye West is, such that he's been all over my feeds that much I felt compelled to wonder what the authors of the above essays would make of it, and, well, then, I can't think of any dignifed way to end this horrendous post-script.]

How to Read Buildings

This book, a graphic crash-course in architecture by Carol Davidson Cragoe, more or less did what it said on the tin - which was to walk me through various facets of buildings and how and why they vary depending on historical styles. Each double-page spread is filled with five helpful images (ranging from utterly unhelpful line sketch to hyper-realistic high-detail drawings) of examples. Following an introductory trio of chapters about types of building, the 'grammar of style', and common building materials, Carol Cragoe then walks us through columns, capitals, arches, roofs, gables, vaults, domes, towers, doors, porches, windows, stairways, chimneys, fireplaces, and ornamentation. The sheer variety of architectural features out there is something I've never systematically looked into, despite my being an avid-yet-casual enjoyer of looking at buildings: from the gorgeous vaulted roofs and intimidating spires of medieval Gothic buildings to the friendly curvatures of Rococo or the harsh efficiency of modernism, the cultural and technological contexts of building styles has yielded enormous breadth in how buildings can come to look and function. I certainly learned a lot. (A glossary of architectural jargon at the back helps one retain all this knowledge for all those [never] times in the future that you'll not only look appreciatively at a building but point out a given feature.) I also found this book almost unspeakably dull, finishing it only because

1. It belongs to my housemate Chris, and he's leaving Sheffield soon. He doesn't even know I've got it I don't think, I borrowed it ages ago and got so bored of it that it's just been sat in my room since about November.
2. It's quite short, so I may as well have squeezed an extra blog post out of it.
3. Knowing vague flurries of details about architecture isn't a bad thing, but I'm struggling to envisage a practical use for the non-systematic non-comprehensive mass of information I've ingested, other than deliberately irritating (by talking at length about boring stuff) my younger brother when we see cool buildings on holiday. This may be just enough of a warrant.

Anyway. If you like buildings, culture, history, pictures of buildings, whatever, you might well enjoy this little book. Go for it.

Prosperity Without Growth

This book, an explosive and compelling case for the possibility, nay, necessity, of post-growth economic development by Tim Jackson, should be compulsory reading for every Western economic policymaker. Along with this book on de-growth, it was one of my core texts for an incredibly bleak essay I just finished writing yesterday. My last essay of the year, probably the best and also the most depressing thing I've ever written. In light of this, disproportionately to how excellent this book is, this post will be really short (actually, this time).
   Tim argues that global capitalism has been historically given free rein by an economics that's sorely out-of-touch with real life on a physical planet to the extent that our world economy now threatens natural boundaries and limits. Some of these are obvious depletion issues - we're using up non-renewable resources without establishing sustainable replacements for when they run out, and we're exploiting renewable flows of energy and resources at a pace that far outweighs nature's capacity to regenerate them. In short, a crunch is coming, and the best hope we have of meeting this challenge is to abandon our structural enslavement to consumerism, which only perpetuates inequality and injustice and doesn't even substantively improve subjective human wellbeing in these prosperity-by-growth societies. Instead, we must look to localism, environmentalism, egalitarianism, and contentment with a life less dependent on material attainments, as pillars of a new direction for the world's political and economic systems. Obviously this is an enormous shift, but Tim outlines along with the arguments in favour of such a huge redirection various policies that could help accelerate changes toward such a transition being possible.
   Overall - an absolutely superb and essential book, if you're interested in or have even a scrap of influence in the realms of politics, economics, ecology, human society's future stability, and individual wellbeing, (and especially the tight nexus where all these topics overlap at ideas about post-growth development), give this a read.

Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era

This book, a collection of fifty-one short essays (written by fifty-six different people) edited by Giacomo D'Alisa, Federico Demaria and Giorgos Kallis (who as a threesome also wrote a longish introduction and shortish epilogue), is way overdue at the library and I've just finished it in a mad reading-rush and am going to bash out this post as quickly as my conscience will allow before returning it. 'Degrowth' as an idea is a radical response to the fact that our economies have, in the richer nations at least, attained a state of affluence far beyond what is necessary to sustain human wellbeing at an equitable and sustainable and satisfactory level, but persist in pursuing growth, further widening social inequalities, deepening structural problems, and putting enormous strain on the global ecosystem (which fortunately our economy has nothing to do with).* Economic growth, despite the obviousness of its posing a serious range of problems to global human/natural welfare, is simply not questioned by the vast majority of thinkers and policymakers! However, some people do question it, and these ideas are rapidly gaining traction in the left, as the explanatory frameworks employed by 'degrowthers' are nicely congruent with several others on the left, so issues and policy solutions broadly supported in a plethora of progressive groups are represented where they all converge - upon the need for degrowth.

   The essays are split into four chunks, and in lieu of wanting to go through properly summarising themes I'm basically just going to list them.** The first section looks at lines of thought by which arguments for degrowth can be made: anti-utilitarianism, bioeconomics (a.k.a. ecological economics), critiques of development, social-environmental justice, currents of environmentalism, societal metabolism, political ecology, and steady-state economics.

   The second section looks at core concepts needed to be understood widely in a degrown society (or, more pressingly, in order to transition to one): autonomy, capitalism, care, commodification, commodity frontiers, the commons, conviviality, dematerialisation, dépense, depoliticisation, pedagogy of disaster, entropy, emergy, GDP, growth, happiness, decolonisation of the imaginary, Jevons' paradox, neo-Malthusianism, peak oil (etc), social limits to growth, and simplicity.

   The third section looks at grassroots- and policy-level actions (or spheres of action) that may help spur degrowth and hence the transition to a sustainable economy: going back-to-the-land, eco-communities, urban gardening, 'nowtopianism', basic income & maximum income, job guarantees, work-sharing, unions, co-operatives, community currencies, debt audits, the digital commons, public money creation, post-normal science, and civil disobedience (with another chapter specifically looking at how Spanish indignados and the Occupy movement were good in this respect). Also in this section is a frankly disappointingly vague chapter by Tim Jackson about the 'New Economy', but given how specific and well-aimed all the other chapters were, and given that Tim Jackson's book Prosperity Without Growth is a landmark work in this field (which I'm also reading for the same essay for which I devoured this one, so -) it's only fair that his chapter could be a general-summary-kind-of-useless one.

   The fourth section looks at socio-cultural, philosophical and political ideas that have arisen around the world that overlap considerably with the aims of degrowthers: from feminist economics, to South America's buen vivir, to Gandhi-inspired economics of permanence, to the Bantu peoples' traditional worldview of Ubuntu.

   Anyway. I'm dropping this book in the Returns tub and leaving the library. This book is extremely interesting: anyone concerned about economic and/or environmental justice would find a lot of thought-provoking stuff in here, presented in an easily accessible bitesize chapter format, which is actually a really nice way of navigating through a large pile of smaller issues gathered around a holistic polemic.

   Reduce, reuse, recycle! And break neoliberal hegemony's stranglehold on economic institutions and political society, where it is redirecting all social efforts to the maximisation of productivity which in turn perpetuates gross inequalities and injustices and perilous damage to ecological systems - break it, and restructure almost everything about our world in a way that promotes sustainability, equity, community, and human flourishing!***

* Irony. Everything that happens in the global economy is 100% dependent, in so many ways that I couldn't even start listing them because I'm not a scientist but you can probably think of a few yourself, on the biosphere functioning healthily.

** Some of these concepts are extremely interesting, but there are fifty-one of them and no way am I going to try to briefly describe each, so if your curiosity has been piqued... you're a citizen of the internet, you should know what to do.

*** This is the problem with progressivism; the more holistic and system-based your analysis of problems gets, yes, the more you can claim to see the bigger picture and thus you can more accurately propose individual-, community-, and government-level solutions, but past a certain stage it gets very hard to reduce to a catchy mantra. Perhaps the best I've ever heard was at the COP21 protests in Paris last December, where there was a crowd of over fifty Spaniards carrying huge red banners shouting "¡AAA- AH! ANTI! ¡ANTICAPITALISTA!" over & over again, as we marched down the main streets from the Arc de Triomphe to the Eiffel Tower - where a procession of several thousand peaceful protesters formed a Spoon Chain under a giant long red carpetcloth/rope. (Needless sentimental fact - I had this in my jacket pocket at the time).

Drugs Without the Hot Air

This book, by David Nutt (one of Britain's leading guru of hard-science verdicts on psychoactive drug usage and their harms - he also used to be* a top policy advisor on the topic), is one of those rare kind of non-fiction book, the exquisite and almost impenetrable presentation of brute fact. I love reading these kinds of book about complex and controversial topics - like whether gender is psychologically innate or what the value of socioeconomic equality is - it takes a certain breed of author to systematically pen down logical overviews of enormous depths of evidence, organised into coherent explanatory frameworks, remaining a robust case without descending to polemics, and still somehow being pretty easy to read.

   The core point of the book is that drug use, being essentially a personal health risk, should be treated as such by policymakers. Obviously this entails extensive analysis of said personal health risks, which are surprisingly high for legal drugs** like alcohol and tobacco and public-perception-defyingly low for certain heavily stigmatised drugs like LSD or MDMA. (I've just written a huge fat chunk of fact, in summary from the book, in the second asterisk bit below, so read that now if you didn't at the **). I've clearly had a fair bit of fun embellishing that last lump of argument with colourful detail, but the crux of the point is in the statistics and the science and the policy results, all of which you should check out for yourself - but you'll struggle to find a more reputable source on the matter than David Nutt, so I'd wager. These aggregations of fact force one to question the norms surrounding drug use, both legal and illegal - prohibition of alcohol failed spectacularly in Depression-era America, and the modern-day 'War on Drugs' has failed on a multitude of fronts (which I can't be bothered to go into detail about but is basically a huge waste of money that has among other things: overlapped systemic racism to fuel mass-incarceration of black African-American men on a horrific scale for minor crimes such as possession of weed; consolidated huge power in criminal gangs in the global South; prevented pharmacological access to substances that have shown enormous benefits in treating certain psychological problems; perpetuated societal trends of wasteful decay through the 'greenlighting' of alcohol and tobacco as legal and thus endorsed for irresponsible use; and so on). The community of socio-medical experts on the matter is almost unanimous in calling for policy-making emphasis on drug use to shift from criminality to public health.
   A government's job (imho) is to strike a balance between protecting liberties and protecting wellbeing - the 'War on Drugs' has quite blatantly failed to do this: the harms of highly-problematic substances like alcohol and tobacco are not minimised (the same can be said of crack cocaine and heroin, as the state more instinctively treats such crippling addictions as moral failures rather than behavioural health problems in desparate need of rehabilitation); the liberties to experience certain states of mind is stripped back to ones unlikely to shake up social norms (imagine if social weed-smoking was as prevalent as pint-drinking - how many more interesting conversations and thoughts would we have instead of just-another-night-down-pub, going for a wee every half-hour past about eleven p.m. and feeling unnatural urges for doner kebabs?); I feel like throughout the spread of this post I've already fleshed out some of my key points in support here; to regather - the policy structures in place are nowhere near adequate or accurate to the reality of risks of harms and benefits for these kinds of activity, being as they are governed by the normative dregs of late-20th-century scaremongering rather than by rational presentations or interpretations of fact.
   Anyway. If you feel strongly opposed to everything I'm saying - good, at least you've read this far through the post, now if you want to be reasonable instead of reactionary, I'd recommend you read the whole of David Nutt's book. And if you're really skeptical, check out his scientific and statistical sources.**** On the flipside, if you're a heartily critical liberal like me, you'll probably enjoy this book and find it massively enrich your opinions and informedness about an interesting yet generally poorly-publicly-debated issues facing British/world society today.
   To cap off this post a bit I'd like to offer a bit of personal reflection on the issue of using illegal substances for recreational purposes. For me the clincher here is their [il]legality - I absolutely do not condone such activities, not because their being legislatively prohibited renders them immoral, but because the risks of prosecution are massive, and hippies like me probably wouldn't cope well in the criminal justice system, even just brushing up against it slightly. Also, as a Christian, I must cite the biblical exhortation to in clear conscience obey worldly rulers' laws, as these are people God has put in authority over us, whether I find their exercise of such authority agreeable or not (this is why I'm such a keeno for getting Christians into counter-hegemonic activism, as resignation to political order is often lived out as acceptance of preventable injustice) - since recreational drug use is, in my view, in and of itself a morally neutral activity, I feel abstinence is probably best practice in societies where it's illegal. Despite this, given the weight of evidence about these policies' failures (discussed literally everywhere in this post) in promoting liberties and minimising harms, I do strongly advocate for the decriminalisation of many***** currently illegal psychoactive substances, and for such drugs' availability to be couched in heavy regulation and education for public health. From the sounds of it, there is much communal-emotional and artistic and transcendental-experiential benefit to be had from responsible use of some of these substances, particularly several for which the associated risks of harms are astoundingly low. (See final asterisk bit below.) Needlessly restricting well-informed responsible individuals' access to potentially good things is, in my view, a plain abuse of legislative power - especially when done so through a campaign that fuels and perpetuates so much injustice, not to mention comprehensively failing to minimise harms, or even reduce usage by notable figures.
   This was meant to be a relatively short post. Ah well. I always find it's better to run into fullish explanations of one's own perspective when writing about controversial issues, as putting forth your case with more detail and structure helps prevent angry confused commenters arguing against a straw man of your own creation because you couldn't be arsed to do a proper man. Or it would, if I ever got angry confused commenters. I don't tend to get any commenters at all, because nobody reads this blog, which is fine by me.

* As in, isn't anymore, because in a stunningly ironic demonstration of some of this book's key points, the government 'disagreed' with his scientifically and statistically sound findings and sacked him in 2009.

** Take issue with this phrasing? Think referring to alcohol and tobacco, or even things like caffeine and paracetamol, in the same category as powerful hallucinogenics and the likes of meth, ket, and crack, is ridiculous? It's probably because your definitions of what a 'drug' is have been shaped by a mixture of extreme cultural examples of drug use and public information programmes exaggerating probable harms of drug use to encourage abstinence, rather than the scientific definition of 'drug', which is basically a chemical taken into the body to produce an effect (other than sustenance - we call that 'food'). These effects can be but are not always psychoactive - magic mushrooms, whiskey, and cannabis are examples of drugs that alter one's mental state. Drugs can be used medically (e.g. aspirin, morphine) or recreationally (e.g. most psychoactive drugs, as are the focus of drug policy and this book), and of these psychoactive substances there is no clear or consistent pattern of correlation between their potential harmfulness, experiential intensity, and legal availability.
   For example, let's briefly compare ecstasy to alcohol. The former is linked to between ten and fifty deaths in the UK per year (though looking closer at case-by-case almost all of these result from combinations of poor provision of public education about how to rave responsibly and the risk of dealers fobbing people off with sometimes-dangerously impure substances, which would be an entirely avoidable problem in a legally regulated market) while the latter is linked to the deaths of around 40,000 Brits annually (also linked to 7,000 traffic incidents and 1,200,000 violent incidents per year, not to mention that it has 3,500,000 British addicts (alcoholism being a drug addiction so common to the UK that it seems to have been co-opted and justified as a reasonably widespread sociocultural quirk), is a significant contributing factor in 40% of domestic abuse and 50% of child protection cases, and overall is estimated to cause between £30 and £55 billion [yep] of damage to global societies and economies worldwide every year). Ecstasy is also almost universally described as a more intrinsically pleasant subjective experience than alcohol when taken responsibly (given that rather than slowing down your whole physiology and merely lowering inhibitions, it gives one's brain a bath in seratonin, leading to an energy spurt, also functioning effectively as a chemical flood of happiness and love***). More - whereas booze has been indisputably linked to depression and similar mental health issues on a major scale, experimental treatments using ecstasy have yielded incredibly promising results for otherwise extremely difficult-to-treat disorders (such as PTSD). 
   And yet in the UK, being as it is Class A under the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, possession of ecstasy for personal use can (if you're unlucky and get caught by lairy police officers on your way to a warehouse full of banging techno and well-hydrated and surprisingly huggy strangers who automatically feel like friends) slap you in for a seven year sentence, while anyone over the age of 18 can waltz into the nearest Wetherspoons and sit quaffing an enormous range of well-regulated and high-tax-generating and generally-quite-nice-in-moderation [and legal] products until they get into an aggressive stumbling argument with someone because they shouted "BREXIT" ironically and were misinterpreted by that local regular who's an avid xenophobe (perhaps because decades of alcoholism has made it hard to take in any cohesive opinions about the contemporary world more cosmopolitan than, say, those of Nigel Farage).

*** If you have video proof of people on MDMA being anywhere near as aggressive as a standard drunken Englishman, I will buy you a pint. And then fight you.

**** Of course it's fully and extensively referenced! We're not barbarians, are we?

***** Based on David Nutt's book, my own research through reputable portals, and having had some good insightful conversations with friends and acquaintances about their experiences with drugs (one does not simply [do a philosophy degree & be part of an environmental activist group & whatever else - student life is rife with these people and they're largely lovely] without meeting some pretty 'open-minded' folk), I have settled on a short list of some of the most common and widely-known illegal psychoactive substances that I feel should probably be largely legal, at least to the same extent as alcohol, based on their effects and health risks.
   So, in no particular order: common-or-garden weed/hash, LSD, magic mushrooms, nitrous oxide; also skunk and MDMA though possibly in a more highly-regulated category, and ketamine and cocaine in a yet higher one.
   Obviously, given the health and wellbeing foundations of my opinion here, I would only condone the use of such substances if legalised and properly regulated, and with users being fully aware of the physiological risks they're putting themselves at by taking a given drug, including systems for working out and sticking to responsible dosages to avoid social dysfunctionality and physical risk. Acting based upon the best available scientific and statistical information is crucial - you can't be responsible without being aware. I envisage such an endpoint to resemble current markets for alcohol and tobacco: you might buy a gram of coke in branded packaging decorated only by perfunctory information about safe usage and a big cigarette-packet-style picture of some coke-diseased organ or something accompanied by words to the effect of "LOOK AT THIS DISEASE THAT COKE OFTEN CAUSES": you might buy a pre-rolled spliff (if Netherlands-type coffee-shop culture were to filter over as an alternative to English pub culture) that must legally disclose at the point of sale what strength it is, in units, or some kind of measure of tetrahydrocannabinol-(the active chemical in marijuana)-per-joint, much like alcoholic beverages divulge their alcohol-per-drink as a percentage: you might buy a flap of LSD-soaked paper in a well-packaged envelope also containing a small but detailed booklet explaining how to arrange your environment and circumstances optimally.
   Who knows what the future holds?

Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom

This book, a collection of essays by bell hooks, is truly brilliant. I read it to explore ideas about the importance of education in shared interpretations of society for normative trends towards social justice (especially on things like race and gender), having been awakened in the last couple of years to critical theory and feminism, and having long been interested in education's potential for radicalisation (or perpetuation of hegemonic injustice) - and also because I'm deliberately expanding my bookshelf beyond the 'default'* of white men, and where better to start than enormously influential black woman bell hooks? Specifically, in a book about how learning can help alter individual attitudes through empowerment and so overturn prevailing inequalities?
   hooks's book is part of a trilogy of essay collections about how education can be a positive force for change and justice. Her other two books in this series look more in-depth at how classrooms can be used to cultivate diverse, tolerant, pluralistic communities, and how individual students can be encouraged to question norms so as to be willing to 'transgress' these and so be better-suited as spokespersons of freethinking liberty. This book is less specific, offering 'practical wisdom' distilled from hooks's years spent as a teacher and thinker on a huge range of complex issues - from the two mentioned above to difficulties of sex and race that infiltrate educational structures to how best to communicate or cooperate in certain contexts to the uses of certain emotions or aspects of human experience in forging effective education. The core focus is on 'engaged pedagogy', a model of education in which the teacher-student relationship is not one of didactic "I have knowledge, you do not, allow me to impart it while you sit there passively"-ness nor of utterly ineffective "all perspectives are equal and worthwhile so let's discover everything together, go on, small child, you first"-ness. Engaged pedagogy recognises that education hinges upon an inequality of knowledge, but doesn't allow this to obstruct formation of communities or entrench any other existing social/political inequalities (e.g. race/gender); teachers in this model are seen as empowering students to realise their full complex identities and engage with systems of knowledge and understanding through critically thinking about issues as they encounter them, from not only their perspective but from sharing critically-thought-about-perspectival-realisations between other members of their diverse classroom/society. There are thirty-two chapters exploring an enormous range of issues but all centred on this view of education. Each chunk is shortish and highly readable, and the overall viewpoint is utterly compelling, rich with hope for human capacities and a genuine warmth and almost Christian-esque love that surprised me given the righteous but unforgiving anger that characterises so much of contemporary identity politics, an intellectual sphere to which bell hooks probably is what Alfred Marshall is to neoclassical economics. Or something.
   I don't really have any of my own thoughts or reflections on this book - it's just astoundingly good. It's challenging, enlightening, and encouraging, and if you're even half-interested in working toward an egalitarian society and/or working in an even half-educational role, you should 100% read this book.



* 'Default' because you can pretty much guarantee that on most topics, the first well-reviewed or highly-recommended book you'll find will be by some white guy, probably Western and heterosexual, if it's a 'classic' probably dead. Seeking out alternative perspectives isn't that much effort and is deeply important.

Status Anxiety

This book. the internationally bestselling guide to a vaguely-but-not-too-vaguely-defined conception of social angst about one's position and perception by acclaimed pseudo-philosopher* Alain de Botton,** is pretty good. I got it in a second-hand English bookshop in Amsterdam, of all places. My thoughts on this book are quite straightforward ("HA" thinks the discerning reader, wise to my promises of 'shortish posts', "here we go again, it's guaranteed to be an absurd thousand-or-two-word barely-structured mental drippages, one which I will not read" - yeh well shut up, discerning reader) but I really enjoy writing unplanned spurts of thoughtful text so I'm gonna have a bit more fun with this one.***

   It's deeply ironic that that should've been the last sentence of the only paragraph (asterisked sub-bits, thankfully, included) to have been autorecovered; I am actually now going to have entirely no fun with this blogpost, since my laptop just crashed unceremoniously and I lost about eight hundred words. Sucks. I'd done pretty interesting and wittily-written sections on the lack of diversity represented in de Botton's encouraging pages (despite drawing on economics, philosophy, history, art, literature, politics, psychology, and whatnot, probably (no joke) 95% of who he cites or references are either educated white men who lived in Europe between 1650 and 1950, or Ancient Bloody Greeks) and on the extensive overlaps status anxiety seems to have with politico-economic systems (which lended some interesting ammunition to the psychological-emotional elements in my ever-growing personal-opinion-critique of capitalism). But these sections were lost, like tears in the oven, because for some reason even though Google Docs has an autosave feature powerful enough to actually bring a medium-to-large moth**** back to life and even Microsoft Word has an emergency unsaved-document auto-capture function if your computer crashes, but Blogger for some reason allowed me to blithely tap away hundreds of words without once thinking to itself that it should autosave. There is a 'Save' button on the post composition page, but who uses that!? (I did, just now, in sheer terror of my laptop and Blogger taking joint revenge against this lengthy complaint.) So anyway, rather than rewrite all this lost gold (it's shockingly hard to remember exactly what paragraphs you've just witnessed sucked into digital oblivion before your very eyes) I'm just gonna blast through a quick summary of the book and briefly state my largest thought-reaction to it.
   The book opens with a definition of status anxiety, which is essentially just when people worry about their place in the world relative to other people and feel sad about it when they perceive themselves to be doing worse than they'd like. The book is then split into two parts, firstly looking at five possible causes of status anxiety:

• Lovelessness: (general loneliness & lack of social acceptance)
• Snobbery: (overvaluing sociocultural status markers)
• Expectation: (holding unrealistic ones)
• Meritocracy: (personal failure is possible despite skills & hard work)
• Dependence: (we're inextricable from our socioeconomic contexts)

   No, I didn't summarise those in much detail, did I? Read the book if you're bothered. And then of course part two, looking at five possible solutions to status anxiety:

• Philosophy: (dissecting ideas to enlighten ourselves)
• Art: (engaging with culture to enlighten ourselves)
• Politics: (engaging with socioeconomic structures for change)
• Christianity: (warm fuzzy feelings of acceptance through church community, supporting an earnest vision of human equality through all their creation in God's image and thus any social factors affecting their 'status' are bunk in the eyes of the almighty and not something to get too bummed-out about)
• Bohemia: (hiding in a community of like-minded enlightened aesthetes, hippies, pot-smoking book-reading sandal-wearing meat-eschewing lefty scum. I'm joking but this chapter should be pretty self-explanatory if you grasp the basic definition of 'bohemian', which entails a flagrant disregard for social norms)

   Each of these ten chapters (each varying massively in length and number of pictures) is well-written, topically relevant, and explains well how each them may cause or solve to some degree our burdens of status anxiety. Overall, it's a very easily-readable and warmly enlightening book, one which, as the rest of Alain de Botton's work, goes a long way to demystifying (if not de-pretentiousnessifying) elements of intellectualism, in a goodwilled attempt to help people understand themselves and their lives better, and so have better ones. And this book fulfils that function pretty well. It's educational in an engaging, pleasant, and cheers-you-up kind of way, the details of complex thinkers' works brought to life in application to common problems. I'd absolutely recommend anyone read this.
   But for one complaint I have with it (and not just it, all of Alain de Botton's work that I've read or watched-on-YouTube so far) - it completely guts Christianity, guts it like a fish that Alain's not going to eat anyway because it upsets his stomach but he found it lying on the beach and he's always wanted to gut a fish out of a curious itching for the performance of minor masculine tasks. I was surprised he did a chapter about it at all, but having read the chapter, it may as well have been a chapter in which he similarly gutted the fishes of Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism; or just not done any fish-gutting and written a straight-up chapter about 'supportive communities gathered around more-or-less transcendental ideals' (admittedly, he did write a chapter about this too, the Bohemia one).***** What I mean by all of this, is in his discussion of religion, he detaches it from the part that means anything substantive at all - theology, and the possible truth thereof. Like, philosophy and art and politics are all excellent and diverse fields in which one can explore one's place in the world and find and create and actively work for meaning in multifarious ways; and bohemian lifestyles are the perfect space in which to do that. But religions are not in this same category, they're not a 'pick-and-choose-until-you-find-what-you-like' type of deal: religions make objective claims about what the universe is, what we are, what life is, what God is (if one's inluded), and what this implies about how we should think and act. Alain's discussion of how God making humanity in God's image renders us absolutely equal is pretty sound, and here an excellent blow to any attempt to manipulate social status in any way other than the egalitarianism supported by Christianity. Likewise, I can't disagree that church is an excellent form of community support and encouragement - it is, of course it is, it's designed for that purpose, humans are designed for that purpose. But the whole chapter on Christianity focuses on these two aspects: which is fairenough in a sense, because they form a wholesome case for how Christianity can be a solution to status anxiety. But while true, it's shortsighted, it's mischaracterisation; Christianity is more than that, it's not a field like art or politics or philosophy where nothing is fixed and argument or experiment drives development forever, nor a lifestyle like bohemia where anything goes in a liberal cooperative inclusive sense: Christianity proposes objective truths about the world that demand an answer. Objective truths stretching far beyond our being made-in-God's-image or being suited-for-community-for-which-the-church-is-the-archetype; truths that ultimately lead to, yes, a complete eradication of status anxiety, if only through a complete rebirth of creation in Jesus, and I'm not gonna explain the whole of it because there's a load of books on Christian theology that I've written posts about before and you can access the list of these through the labels boxes on the right, and also I've over-run my intended wordcount again, and I'm terrified my laptop might crash a third time.
   Isaac Stovell.
   Out.

* Just kidding, Alain, if you're reading this - I love School of Life: and while there are occasionally certain issues I feel you don't explore with enough critically nuanced vim and/or vinegar, I can easily look past this in realising that making such compromises is regrettably a necessary part writing books and short animated videos with the aim of popularising discussion of Big Ideas - an endeavour which I wholeheartedly support . Also there are a fair few of your views which I disagree with (especially strongly on theology - hey Alain, if you made it past that last sentence why not read the rest of this post?) but for the most part you seem to be on the same page as me so hey, whatevs, let's go for an erudite conversation over toasted sandwiches and herbal tea sometime. Or something.

** Also author of The Consolations of Philosophy, Religion for Atheists, Art as Therapy, Cats Are Basically People Too Penélope Damn Your Non-Inclusive Allergies, and the Waterstones'-holiday-bargain-table-second-best-selling autobiographical My Quite Nice Life as a Pretend French Intellectual.
(sorry Alain sorry sorry sorry read previous asterisk!!!!1)

*** There are several blog-writing gimmicks that I just get a huge kick out of using: the pointless asides relegated to asterisked paragraphs (one of which this entire bit will be), totally-unnecessarily-long-hyphenated-construction-of-a-concept-that-could-just-be-explained-normally, the well-chosen random (but pleasant!) link for a random phrase (oh yeh now that was a well-chosen link - just to point out that the previous usage of the word 'that' was also a hyperlink, something that shouldn't normally warrant pointing out, but I've italicised it to help the sentence flow and the link's default boldness on a skinnier font might be harder to spot; also I wanted an excuse to embark upon a tortuous run-on sentence inside parentheses, which was the next on my list of gimmicks), the self-deprecating reflexive addresses to an enthusiastic audience that largely (I've seen my own blog's viewing statistics - hrmph) doesn't exist, and finally the self-indulgent meta-commentary, of which this entire bit has also been a part.

**** I promised I was going to have no more fun with the remainder of this post: hence why I purposefully wrote this but, knowing full well that it was a lie, and that dead moths can only remain as such until their consumption or decomposition. It's a harrowing and bleak thought. Especially since I quite like moths.

***** I shit you not, my laptop literally just crashed again. Fortunately I'm deeply paranoid now about the whole charade of blogwriting, and have been mashing the 'Save' button every few sentences. Perhaps the great Alain de Botton is more powerful than we had previously conceived, and is using his populist powers of pseudo-philosophy (SEE FIRST ASTERISK) to junk up my computer cos he can sense I'm respectfully disagreeing with him on the point of his neglect of theology in discussing religion? Or many he's angry that I keep insulting-him-but-not-really? Or maybe it's upsetting him how many metaphorical fish I've gutted? Hm.

Happiness by Design

This book, a highly-readable practical distillation of wisdom gleaned from years of behavioural socioeconomic and psychological research into personal and public wellbeing by happiness guru Paul Dolan, is a real treat. I picked it up out of pure whimsy (from a little high-end bookstall in St Pancras station, of all places), which is not my usual mode of bookbuying, but I'm very glad I did, as it helped build on loads of long-run trains of thought that I've been having for the past couple of years (as such, expect me to use this excuse to litter this relatively-short (every time I say that they seem to continue on to relative-longness in defiant verbosity anyway - I need a better editor) post with loads (and I mean loads) of links to an eclectic selection of previous blogposts).*
   Before I dive into reflection, I'll give an overview of the book, which despite the breadth and quantity of academic studies it draws on is extremely consistent in proposing a simple system for managing our lives in a way conducive to happiness. Part one of the book lays out this system, exploring how happiness is evaluated, felt, and aimed for. Dolan, in true behavioural-economist form, argues that happiness, as people generally experience it, is a psychological output resulting from inputs that yield combinations of pleasure and purpose. Maximising our own happiness is achieved by realising our preference functions for pleasure and purpose, working out how reasonably we can attain ideal combinations for these, and taking practical steps to reshape our lives to resemble and contain these combinations. The key element of how we do so is attitudinal - it's what we pay attention to that yields pleasure or purpose in our lives, and therefore considerable thought and effort should go into where we allocate our attention. This part concludes with an excellent chapter about psychological hindrances to doing this well; generally subconsciously, our lives fail to make us happy in particular ways because our desires are for unpleasurable or unpurposeful things, our expectations unrealistic, or our beliefs erroneous. Part two of the book, very straightforwardly, builds on this framework for how we can better attain happiness by giving some very generalistic (so suited to a range of people) but still rigorous (so not fatuous and actually extremely helpful) pointers about how we can reform our attitudes and behaviours to make our lives more conducive to happiness. The whole book is couched in the terminology and methods of behavioural economics and statistical psychological studies, which I loved, because it lends a strong scientific flavour to what is essentially an easily accessible and enjoyable book about how to take practical steps to making your life a bit (or a lot, maybe) better. Paul Dolan's framework is coherent, positive, and flexible - there isn't anyone I wouldn't recommend this book to if you want what must be one of the least wishy-washy self-help manuals out there, not to mention learning a buttload of interesting stuff from psychology, economics, epidemiology and whatnot about public behaviour and wellbeing (all these elements will probably be more interesting to you if you're an outright social science nerd, like me).
   Okay, now the kind-of-reflective bit.
   I'm not going to try to outline all, or even a summary, of my thoughts about happiness and wellbeing and life and purpose and so on from the last couple of years, as that would be pretty much unreadably personal and unwriteably long. But here are a few** thoughts.
   Happiness is, I think it's fair to say, taken as the point of life by most modern young Western people. Largely, it is pursued out of an individualistic perspective that sets up a goal which one expects or hopes will make one happy, and then the pursuit of this goal is prioritised (within a complex series of social and economic constraints) above most other things until it is attained - or not. In this way, we are like Jay Gatsby - albeit lacking his vast resources (money, prestige, charm, a nonjudgmental neighbour played by Spiderman). But even despite his enormous lack-of-constraints, Gatsby [SPOILER ALERT] failed in his personal quest for happiness, and so do many of us. We encounter problems during our pursuits of whatever it is we think might make us happy, and many of these are personal or circumstantial, but often they are connected to wider systems of constraints on the reasonable of individual capabilities to seek pleasure or purpose. In terms of happiness, this might be a helpful way to pose the concept of injustice: the avoidable perpetuation of these structures of constraints on people's pursuit of happiness. These kinds of injustices are not hard to see: socially and culturally pervasive sexism constrains women, aspects of freemarket economics constrain people all over the world in different ways, our skew-whiff relationship with nature constrains both the capacity of future generations to sustain themselves and also leaves contemporary society living in a stilted world alien to the biosphere that sustains us. Not everyone is affected by or necessarily cares about these injustices, but the fact of the matter is, this world is far from perfect, and we as relatively insignificant parts of it can hardly expect our quests for happiness to go smoothly at every turn. So we get frustrated, we get depressed, we turn cynical, and the modern response to so having so many potential traffic-jams on our road to self-fulfilment is, largely, to streamline our concerns. In Paul Dolan's language, to restrict our attention to only things that bring us maximal combinations of pleasure and purpose and stop giving a fuck (to use Sarah Knight's language, albeit in a mischaracterisation of her argument) about things that don't feature in those combinations. Basically, in the grim disappointing mess of reality, the search for happiness makes us selfish beings, as the way we define our priorities becomes subjective. And not everyone suffers the same injustices, not everyone experiences the same constraints, not everyone's struggles overlap - in fact they often conflict. This means that the quest for happiness, in aggregate, if people take their own subjective preferences and ambitions as the core pursuit of that quest, may well actually perpetuate injustices. (This is similar to what I discussed in my post about Sarah "IDGAF" Knight's book, and is also, I think, the one area (but it's a biggy) where Paul Dolan's book falls down in providing a coherent map to living well.)
   So, what's missing? Objectivity.
   This obviously doesn't entail everyone abandoning their own perspectives or preferences or whatever. This is the cultivation of knowledge, in individuals, of the nature of the world, of their place in it, of what they can reasonably expect to get out of life, of similar realities for other people, and of the legitimacy of both their own and another persons' claims to any particular pursuit. Wisdom, in a nutshell. Imbuing people with wisdom helps them come to terms with and make the best of situations they're in, rather than the desire-driven striving to be somewhere else, somewhere better, that comes with the subjective pursuit of happiness. Wise people can and do attain happiness, of course, but never indefinitely - because nobody ever does. Happiness is a feeling, it's inherently transient. Wisdom helps people know this, and so be comfortable with their lives even where they're not feeling particularly pleasurable or purposeful. This state of wisdom-based contentment I think is best referred to as joy: one finds a consistent set of good*** objective truths to live by and refer back to constantly, keeping both happy and unhappy moments in perspective.
   What is wisdom though? I want to clarify straight-off that it is not cleverness. It is knowledge, of a sort, but not the taught-or-learnt kind - the living, intuitive, adaptive kind, that can never really be proved beyond argument but the truth of which is generally evident. For examples - it is better to build than destroy, to trust than fear. However, the complexity of uncovering objective facts about a world that has so much wrong with it proves the application of wisdom difficult indeed. At the heart of wisdom though is a practical understanding of who you are and what you're doing in the world. Mindfulness (the practice of relinquishing worldly concerns by focusing on a simple task or sensory input) is one method, long-established largely through meditative Eastern practices and picked up increasingly in modern times by Westerners seeking inner peace, of trying to attain insights or disciplines that help one know oneself. Philosophy and poetry, though extremely different in style and substance, are both also things that can help us realise things about ourselves and the world that empower us, enlighten us, exercise our faculty of wisdom intellectually and spiritually. I think the chief practical insight of wisdom, something that I'd like to believe all humans know intuitively, something so obvious once known but so easily forgotten that regular reminders from personal mindfulness and conversation with friends, from philosophy, poetry, novels, newspapers, strangers, rocks, memories, TV, trees, even Buzzfeed quizzes (eh, well, ok) are needed to reorient our awareness and living-out-the-implications of this enormous truth, is that other people's lives matter just as much as yours. They are just as complex, just as worthwhile, just as full of self-justification and self-doubt, full of joy and fear and turmoil and loss and longing, subject to constraints on agency and choice, directed by a mixture of decision and circumstance.
   This in tremendously obvious (I hope) but I so easily forget it in the moment, swept along in my own subjective pursuit of what I think will give me pleasure and purpose. The point of philosophy or meditation or poetry or art (we'll come to that in a sec) is, in this view, to instill empathy, to make that empathy genuine and affirmative and proactive, to strengthen the bonds between human persons that they may help each other have better lives. And intellectualism can be an enormous asset in doing this: critical theory is a perfect example of a field where academics, in seeking to understand culture and politics, have developed ways of explaining differences between people and differing constraints placed upon them so that these groups can learn better about the others' experience and act in a way that helps lift those constraints rather than perpetuate them (remember, this is technically (well, by my own definition) injustice). Art though may be the greatest man-made vehicle of empathy. I mean - paintings and films and theatre and television and music aside (sorry, it's not that I don't love vast swathes of those things but this, if you hadn't noticed, is a blog about books) - basically any good novel or short story will test you, will force you to empathise, at least some of the way, with a character who is not altogether like you; will bring you to understand how another mind, another life, might work, and see something of human sincerity there, even if there isn't much. A few books that do this brilliantly are this and this and this. Oh, and don't even tell me you wouldn't offer Holden Caulfield a cup of tea and just try to have a nice chat with the poor kid.
   All worthwhile philosophy, all earnest and meaningful poetry or prose, leads in some way to the conclusion of wisdom that is empathy, extended equally and absolutely to everyone. In another word, love. I believe this pops up so consistently as the endpage of morality, the central gist of human life, not because it is a nice-but-improbable target that idealists throughout history have pinned up as a muse, but because it is objectively true. As a Christian I believe that God is the point of everything, including human life, including my life, including art and trees and philosophy and psychology and behavioural economics and the pursuit of happiness and everything we might interact with during that pursuit; and I also believe that God literally is love. God exists in ongoing eternal relationships, and we were made to do so too. (This post is already waaay long so if you're curious about the theology check out this excellent overview of Christianity.) This solves the objectivity problem: God has absolute claims over all aspects of reality because God created and sustains them, so we have a definite start on how to define 'good' (this book is an excellent philosophical exploration of how God's being good provides a platform for ethics, as well as guiding behaviours consistent with Christian joy). I do not believe that Christianity has solved the problem of happiness - in this broken world, there will always be constraints and frustrations to pleasure or purpose-seeking, no matter how much injustice is tackled. However, I do think that Christianity shows us the fallacy underpinning the whole pursuit: happiness, while good, is fleeting, and is not the point - God is the point, and God is love. True wisdom is knowing this and acting from it.
   I think, as a concluding remark, that Paul Dolan's excellent insights in this book into what happiness is and how we can actively pursue it are wholely worthwhile and deserve to be read and heeded. However, they are grounded in a subjective and individualistic worldview that pays little attention (ironic) to bigger questions about the point of the entire venture - and these are questions that need asking. Reading Paul Dolan's book without belief in anything concretely objectively good may, I fear, render in people the kind of selfishness that neoliberal society mistakes for rationality. Reading this book in light of a coherent joy-giving worldview though, I think will help people make practical marginal increments on their own happiness while still operating primarily out of love (pay Søren Kierkegaard a visit, my fingers are starting to cramp). Happiness 'by design' of individual agents seeking to maximise it isn't a patch on experiencing happiness as a natural part of a joyful life in loving relationships with God and everyone else.

I've written way too much. Again. Here's some relevant poignant Bible words.

"I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live, that each of them may eat and drink and find satisfaction in all their toil - this is the gift of God."
- Ecclesiastes 3: 10 - 13



* My half-sincerest apologies for that extended double-nested parenthetical statement. That was monstrous and totally unnecessary but quite fun to write.

** A few. A few. Ha. Hahaha! I've just finished writing this post and reading back over it - good grief. How in the name of Buddy Glass do so many small thoughts grossly overextend into full-blown rambles? Ah well. You either read it all or you didn't. Kind regards.

*** I specify 'good' here because if one settled on objective truth that didn't build a worldview that you could comfortably accept your place in, it would ruin you, and you'd probably return, one way or another, to subjective self-directed happiness-seeking, albeit tainted by the haunting knowledge of a universal meaninglessness. Hm.